The idea came in the bleak years after the Armistice, when tens of thousands of Australian servicemen returned to a country unsure how to absorb them. The road would give them work, and it would honour the dead. There were almost no machines. Men swung picks at solid rock, drilled blast holes by hand, and shifted spoil in barrows along ledges that fell away to the sea. The labour was dangerous, and some of the workers were killed building the memorial to their fallen comrades. Construction began in 1919, the first section opened in 1922, and the full route was completed in 1932. For years it was a toll road; once the Victorian government took it over, the toll stopped. The timber Memorial Arch near Aireys Inlet still marks the achievement of the men who made it.

Past Torquay, an anchor symbol appears on the road signs, and the highway commits itself to the coast. This is surfing country. Bells Beach, just out of town, hosts an international competition every Easter, and the surf brands born here read like a roll call of the sport: Rip Curl, Quiksilver, Billabong. Then the bends begin. Between Lorne and Apollo Bay the road becomes the drive you have seen on postcards, curling along the cliff edge with the ocean filling the window. Gum trees lean over the bitumen. At Kennett River, koalas doze in the branches above the car park, and at Cape Otway the oldest surviving lighthouse on mainland Australia has warned ships off this coast since 1848.

Inland through the cool fern gullies of the Otways, then the road swings back to the water for its most famous sight. The Twelve Apostles rise out of the surf in Port Campbell National Park, limestone towers up to 45 metres tall, all that remains as the soft cliffs erode and the sea eats backwards into the land. There were never actually twelve; only ever nine were recorded, and the coast keeps reclaiming them. One toppled into the water in 2005, and another in 2009, leaving seven. Nearby, the arch known for years as London Bridge was joined to the mainland until 1990, when the connecting span suddenly collapsed and stranded two startled tourists on the far stack, rescued later by helicopter. The coastline is beautiful and it is not finished moving.

West toward Warrnambool, the rock formations multiply: The Arch, The Grotto with its sinkhole rockpools, the Bay of Islands at sunset. The names carry the weight of this shore's history. The Bay of Martyrs and the nearby Shipwreck Coast recall the hundreds of vessels lost here in the 19th century, when this was the first sight of Australia for migrants who had crossed the world and the last thing some of them ever saw. Today the danger is gentler but real: the sea is the same one, the cliffs are crumbling, and the warning signs ask you to stay behind the barriers. The men who built the road knew the coast was wild. They built the memorial right at the edge of it.